Async Map and Fold in JavaScript My latest experiment is an implementation of asynchronous/parallel "map" (and other array functions) in JavaScript and Oni. Oni is a "structured concurrency language" embedded in JavaScript. For my source code and commentary, see oni-map at GitHub. You can leave comments at GitHub too. All this time reading Real World Haskell must really have warped my brain if a simple testing framework for a JavaScript program has got me thinking about higher-order functions and concurrency semantics...

My workmate Josh just discovered this isaac@cooper:~
% host 69.69.69.69
69.69.69.69.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer the-coolest-ip-on-the-net.com.


Every Democrat was pretty sure Al Gore was going to win in 2000. Most polls said John Kerry was going to win in 2004. And yet both times they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just remember how you felt then and try your best so it doesn’t happen again. There is so much at stake … the US and the world can’t afford 4 more years of a Republican US President. Even if the GOP seems to be defeated, shattered and panicking, Republican voters always end up voting for their guy on election day, while Democrats have great problems closing the deal. It has to be different this time. We need Obama to win tomorrow, and we need him to win big. And a Democratic wave to get a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a comfortable victory in the House of Representatives, so they can enact a progressive agenda in the upcoming years and restore some of the damage from the last two Bush terms. We also need a solid ‘no’ to Proposition 8 in California and similar ones in other states, so no excuse to stay at your place just because you are in one of the bluest states. I would like to ask you to do your best tomorrow, but probably Larry Lessig does a better job at it. Once we are past this, the hard work starts, trying to hold every elected representative accountable, draft better candidates for future elections, spot DINOs, …, but for now, let’s focus on tomorrow. I am hoping for the best, and I wish I could do more about it, but it’s up to you Americans. Do the right thing and leave everything on the road, you don’t want to regret it tomorrow.

Just read this Techcrunch post about the Android/Google/HTC/T-Mobile phone and loved the last paragraph:

But remember, in the end this is not really about Android versus the iPhone. It s about Web phones versus the brick in your pocket. Simply matching the iPhone on many of these features especially Web browsing and email is going to be enough to help redefine the mobile market. The table stakes have just been raised. From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply. I welcome our new cool future phones

Some months ago I came across Sketch Engine. Sketch Engine is a website that offers a collection of pre-loaded corpora in several languages and the ability to automatically extract collocation information from them among other things. You can get a 30-day free trial account if you want to check it out, the point is that I thought it was really cool, but it was a bit pricy, 55 euros/year for an individual and 1080 euros/year for a site (up to 50 employees and students) and these were the academic licenses!!! And I don’t even have any real need for it So I thought it would be an interesting project to do something similar, albeit just focusing in the ‘word sketching’ part, as described in this paper. After a weekend I got it working although I didn’t devote any second to make it look good as you can appreciate: Collocations and other stuff. For now only the corpus of the state of the union addresses is loaded, with almost 400000 words. You can select that corpus, click on sketch and get the sketch of any word, for example, the ‘word sketch’ for problem. We can see that the adjective used more times with ‘problem’ is ’serious’, although if we look at the relative frequency it’s ‘complex’. The verb which has ‘problem’ as object more times is ’solve’ followed by ‘approach’, ‘address’ and ‘deal’. You can also click on the numbers to see the actual sentences in which these words appear, for example, ’serious problem’. So how does it work? First of all it does part of speech tagging using Apertium. Once the text is POS-tagged we apply a set of ‘regular expression’-like rules to identify the relation between words, such as:

*DUAL
=a_modifier/modifies
2:[tag=adj] [tag=n] 0,2 1:[tag=n] [tag!=n]
This rule expresses the relation between adjectives and the nouns they modify, matching sentences like ‘the red ball‘ and ‘the red football ball‘. Each relation is stored in the database with extra info about position in the text. Once the database is created accessing it to display the sketch and concordance information is really simple. The site and auxiliary tools were written in around 1400 lines of Python/Django. I am still not sure about what to do with this, if there is anyone interested on adding some corpora to it, continue development or anything else, please let me know.

It’s been almost a week already since I arrived to Adelsried. I am going to work here for two weeks and a half (according to the initial contract at least). That means I can’t go to Akademy in the end, too bad The town is quite small, with around 2000 inhabitants, and not much social life, except for the hotel where we are hosted. The hotel is great, probably the best I have ever been to. Great swimming pool and jacuzzi, really friendly staff, nice rooms with big and comfy beds, a magnificent “biergarten” where we have some drinks and dinner every night, delicious food, bikes to ride for free, … Despite the lack of social life, the town is beautiful, first of all it’s in the middle of a natural reservation, with dense forests completely surrounding the city. Every house has a gorgeous garden with loads of flowers and some interesting decorations. The highlight is this really high pole in the city center with loads of coats of arms, and a pine on top of it. Hilarious The work is pretty good too, bleeding edge stuff, really good working environment, nice and international workmates and free drinks And today I uttered my first full sentence in German since lots of years ago!!!

A workmate called my attention today upon the fact that when you search for ‘ebox’ or ‘ebox-platform’ in Google you get some sponsored links from our fierce competitor, Untangle. Here is a screenshot of the ad:

You can see a full screenshot of the search too. On one hand, I am kind of honored about the fact that a California-based company which has raised almost 20 million dollars in venture capital and has over 30 employees is targeting us (a self-funded company) in such an explicit way, it must mean we are definitely on the good track On the other hand, this reminds me of the time when Ximian started to play with KDE keywords … yeah, we both are developing an open-source product, but one of us doesn’t care about ethics that much. BTW, we have a new shiny website

Via Planet Warp, Blaxter blogs about MyEpisodes.com. Useful to keep track of your pending episodes to watch and acquire. I like the “All-In-One!” view. Update: Oh, and as several people mentioned, there is also pogdesign.co.uk/cat, but that’s only a calendar of upcoming episodes, you can’t track your status with it AFAICS. OTOH, it doesn’t require a login, only a cookie.

I am a huge political junkie and I have been closely following Europe and US politics for more than 5 years. After this time and several disappointments, I have to admit that Obama is the first truly inspirational politician I have seen (listen to the Yes We Can song based on his New Hampshire speech). Some of his detractors dismiss his speeches as lousy, empty or vague, but you just have to listen to a couple of them to see that he is genuinely smart (such as the one about faith and atheism or the interview at Google). He doesn’t only take the right stance on most issues that I care about (Iraq, foreign policy, ethics, net neutrality, …), but he does it in a sincere way. Obama just gets it. I have got this impression from watching several of his speeches and interviews, but Marc Andreessen had the chance to spend an hour and a half with him a year ago and got the very same feeling. The main argument against Barack Obama nowadays is his alleged lack of experience. “Watch how I run my campaign”, Barack said to Marc when inquired about that. It’s obvious that running a primary campaign isn’t the same as being POTUS, but being the president’s wife isn’t exactly the same either. So if we compare the Obama and Hillary campaigns we can easily see Hillary’s experience as an “old school” politician. She overstates, lies, accepts loads of money from lobbies (because “they represent people too”, haha), resorts to fear-mongering (”Obama is not a muslim, …, as far as I know”, 3 a.m. ad), sides with McCain if needed to get some extra votes, surrounds herself with nitwits, … . To summarize, she uses every dirty trick she has learned in these years in Washington, and that’s exactly what I am so sick of right now. On the other hand, Obama’s campaign hasn’t just been one of the best organized and executed campaigns I have ever seen, but also the cleanest one. He has managed to overcome double-digit Hillary leads in most states without having to resort to any of these experienced politician’s dirty tricks. If I have to trust one of both to run a country, the decision is obvious. If I didn’t manage to convince you, I hope Lawrence Lessig and xkcd’s Randall Munroe do. Obama is leading and almost there, he just needs the final push. Please, do the right thing.

I have just watched The Wire’s last episode. For those who don’t know about it, The Wire is the greatest TV series ever created (Salon and Slate back me on this). It’s been acclaimed by critics, but widely disregarded by audience. I’ll never forget Jimmy McNulty, a troubled Irish American dipsomaniac murder detective (played by brilliant Brit Dominic West) or Omar Little, a Robin Hood-like stickup homosexual man in west Baltimore. The rest of the deeply portrayed characters of the show are great too, but above all of them, the real starring role belongs to Baltimore. I am sure Baltimore’s reality goes way beyond this show, but I don’t think a show can get more real than The Wire. Each season focuses on a different topic, such as drug-dealing, unions, politics, the press, always keeping the police department around. The story arcs are really long and complex, The Wire is not the kind of show you can enjoy watching a single episode of, but more like, as its own creator - a former Baltimore Sun journalist - put it, a “66 hour movie”. Well, I could keep praising it for hours, but lots of people have done that already, even Barack Obama loves it (:P, let’s ride the hype). Praise available in Spanish too Besides, Eliot Spitzer has made wiretaps really popular again these last days Really, you must see it.

… I used to write in this blog about random things. Let me check what I have done lately … well, first of all I spent 10 days in San Francisco in November, I had a really great time, we spent most of the time there but also paid a visit to the Googleplex, Stanford, Berkeley, … and went several days to the Yosemite National Park, a great trip overall Besides that I gave up one of my jobs (the boring and not challenging one …) two months ago (although it seems like it was ages ago) and started working full-time in my company. In addition, I spent New Year’s Eve in London to begin the year in a different way Right, that was all

Originally I planned to post this with the title "Last night I slept with 300 people" but this night happened two weeks ago... It was the night before the fourth and last day of the 24C3 were I slept in the gym :-) Actually I also planned to blog on the third day but then this day turned out to be really busy... and then I arrived home on new years eve and suddenly it was a week later and now it's the 10th of January. Time flies when you're having fun. And as you might have noticed it's not even the 10th anymore...

Timewarp back to the chaos communication congress! I think it's safe to say that the Debian booth at the 24C3 was a success. It was a nice meeting (and storage) point for Debian people, we collected quite some donations for t-shirts and stuff (the exact amount needs to be examined still) and we were able to help various users and contributors answering Debian specific questions of both kinds: how to install/configure/fix foo and packaging and other development questions from a number of people.. And we had a babelbox setup which was much better understood and perceived, once I added a sign explaining it :-)

Thanks a lot to the 24C3 organizers and the angels (thats how the congress volunteers are called) for making such a smooth and interesting conference as well as giving such a great space to the Debian booth! And equally thanks a lot to all the people operating our booth! For those who are interested to attend next year: roughly 64 talks were held in english, and 26 in german. I saw about five events live...



The sign hung for about an hour unmodified...

On the third day of the congress we had an OLPC.de meeting, which was quite productive and resulted in us founding OLPC Germany this monday. In the aftermath of this meeting I came up with the idea of having an OLPC Europe event at FOSDEM in Brussels in February, which by now has been accepted and scheduled by the FOSDEM organizers. Yay! So if you are in Europe and involved or interested in the OLPC, please mark the 23rd of February 15-17 localtime in your calendar :-) The idea of these projects is probably best summarized with "think global, act local and global", for more detail please read our vision. (And keep in mind this is in its very early stages.) OLPC Europe should also become an interface for all those european OLPC efforts which have been popping up recently and which all take up ressources in Cambridge, the OLPC "mothership", taking ressources away from the children of the world.

Then on the last day of the 24C3 congress I also gave the DebConf7 "thank you, Sponsor"-package to those four people from the freifunk community, who helped us out with accesspoints for Edinburgh. Much to my surprise and joy, they were really happy about it! Funnily two of those four are also among the three OpenWRT developers who ported OpenWRT to the OLPC laptop, which I borrowed to them somewhat in return :-) And now we work together in OLPC.de and .eu. Networking is sometimes really really fun.

Fast forward to 2008. Two days ago I finanlly had the time to to run etch, lenny and sid on the OLPC laptop (with wireless (including WPA), xorg and sound working and dualbooting with the original fedora install) and then yesterday I've created a usbstick which successfully booted a "d-i prototype". Yay! And best of all (for me), most of the actual work was done by other people, I just had to collect the pieces. My next steps will be documenting what I did and prepare a d-i image which actually works. I don't have pics yet (it's Debian running on a laptop, I guess you can imagine this), so for now I will just post another picture I received some three months ago and which made me incredibly happy at that time:



When I have a working d-i running on it, I'll post more pics.

Last weekend I had the chance to attend the Open aLANtejo conference, in beautiful vora, Portugal. I went there to give a presentation about Open Source Game Development and had the chance to meet interesting people that I knew through somebody else or just from the community lore To be honest I had a really better time than I expected Some of the speakers were the Bitrock people, Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) and Juanjo from Igalia. I’m really looking forward to meet up again. The organisation team was also really helpful and passionate about the event, so if you get invited, don’t think twice about going

I love traveling but I have to concede that having aKademy-es in my own city (and five minutes away from my home) is quite convenient It will be great to meet again with the Spanish KDE crew. As Albert said, we’ll have talks, coding and party, and as a local I’ll try to make sure the latter is properly taken care of See you here!

I have just visited the eBox team room and I have discovered a really nice project they are working on. Jos Antonio Calvo (aka Josh) is creating a really cool suite of programs called ANSTE that allows a developer to define network scenarios and run tests easily on them. We are going to use it to perform continuous integration for eBox, running a test of suites nightly to ensure that every module works correctly, which includes stuff like setting up two separate networks, connect them with the OpenVPN eBox module and checking connectivity through the vpn interfaces or ensuring that the traffic shaping module really does its job. Josh’s work is not this far yet, but ANSTE is already able to read XML scenario definition files like this one and generate the Xen virtual machines as specified, with the appropiate software, virtual interfaces, routes, … as defined by the scenario file. It’s also able to run suites of tests which right now are simple scripts. The next steps are integrating Selenium to perform automatized eBox configuration through a browser (thus testing the GUI too), creating nice GUI tools to generate the scenario files and manage the test suites and writing powerful reporting tools. Of course, ANSTE is free software under the GPL license and you can follow (or contribute to) the development in ANSTE’s Trac.

Some weeks ago we started developing KTrace, a graphical KDE frontend for strace. We quickly managed to have something which worked, but development stalled after that. Today we are holding the first KTrace developers meeting to make some decisions about the next features that will be coded. If you want to propose a feature that you would like to see in KTrace (or just a better name proposal), feel free to write a comment

Wow, the pilot of Californication, a new TV series starring David Duchovny (from X-Files hall of fame), is awesome! Quoting Wikipedia, the show is about “a troubled novelist whose obsessions with sex and drugs interfere with his personal and professional lives”. It was created by Showtime and it will begin airing on August 13th but the preair was leaked some days ago. It’s really cool and full of memorable quotes, I hope the rest of the episodes are as nice as the pilot. Go watch it!

According to the latest news from the Ubuntu camp, Gutsy Gibbon will ship with our beloved eBox, and according to the last post in this thread in the Ubuntu forums, it’s going to be the official configuration tool for services. I went to aKademy with eBox lead developer and workmate, Javier Uruen, and we had the chance to attend to Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, where he argued about the benefits of having a six-months release cycle for the most popular open source projects (i.e., KDE, Gnome and OpenOffice). I think this release cycle would suit eBox quite well too, and if synced with Ubuntu releases, would make life easier for both eBox developers and packagers, besides enlarging the free software “pulse”. In any case, we’ll continue to provide Debian-based installers where the base system won’t change that often, for those who are not willing to update their servers each six months. Anyway, this is a big leap towards world domination for eBox We are quite happy that eBox made into Ubuntu and we’ll be eager to work with the maintainers to integrate their changes back into eBox. disclaimer: I’m not an “official” eBox developer, so don’t take my opinions as authoritative, they come mostly from pub-talk with Javier

I had been using fvwm2 for some 10 years when around the beginning of this year, I thought it might be time for a change. My config was originally copied from some SuSE templates and then heavily tweaked over the years, but recently broke more and more in subtle way with new fvwm upstream versions, e.g. moving windows suddenly required a different mouse button. Probably the config was just slightly out of spec and fvwm got "fixed", but it was annoying. The "tiled" window managers I had seen on others' desktops made me curious, so I gave ion3 a try some months ago. The overall appearance was all cool, but it tried a bit too hard to squeeze all windows into tiled windows - of course there's the floating workspace, but creating one was weird, and moving windows even weirder. And if only the (default) key bindings were more vi-like... I admit I never really bothered to read the documentation - probably everything would have been much nicer otherwise. Then there was the big license "wtf" with ion, at which point I started looking around further. dwm looks clearly too l33t to be serious, so wmii was the next choice, 3.1 to be exact. vi key bindings, a nicely configurable status bar, easy workspace switching and window moving. wmii doesn't have horizontally split windows (windows are always in columns), and no "tabbed" windows, though. It didn't warp the pointer to the currently active window (something I got used to with fvwm), but some config tweaks mostly fixed that. This time, I read the documentation, but there's only a 10 page pdf beginners document, but there's not much to configure anyway. Then came lenny. Testing and unstable currently feature version 3.6 which is a big disappointment. It is broken (the default config is unusable), and even after fixing that, it looks like they removed all the little details that I liked. The status bar is still there (though with a new location in the virtual filesystem), the color cannot be changed anymore (unless changing some other color as well). The windows used to have slim 1-pixel (configurable) borders. Now they still have, but the border will be expanded if the window chooses a different size - xterm always rounds down to the next character size, so all my terminals have fat surroundings now. The last-active window in a inactive column still had some markup so I knew which window Alt-Left/Right wound return to, now I have to guess. I wouldn't mind fixing my 3.1 config for 3.6, but I don't think I will, given these issues look unfixable. The 3.1 wmiirc file looked like a sh script, the 3.6 uses eval and a bunch of functions that frighten me. On a positive note, it is now possible to create new workspaces by just selecting them, which is much handier than start-program, wait, move-window-over, move-workspace. I guess I will give ion (2, 3?) another try...